Demanding Justice and Security

Indigenous Women and Legal Pluralities in Latin America

Edited by Rachel Sieder

Rutgers University Press

Across Latin America, indigenous women are organizing to challenge racial, gender, and class discrimination through the courts. Collectively, by engaging with various forms of law, they are forging new definitions of what justice and security mean within their own contexts and struggles. They have challenged racism and the exclusion of indigenous people in national reforms, but also have challenged ‘bad customs’ and gender ideologies that exclude women within their own communities.

Featuring chapters on Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, and Mexico, the contributors to Demanding Justice and Security include both leading researchers and community activists. From Kichwa women in Ecuador lobbying for the inclusion of specific clauses in the national constitution that guarantee their rights to equality and protection within indigenous community law, to Me’phaa women from Guerrero, Mexico, battling to secure justice within the Inter-American Court of Human Rights for violations committed in the context of militarizing their home state, this book is a must-have for anyone who wants to understand the struggle of indigenous women in Latin America.

Demanding Justice and Security offers a panoramic view of Latin American indigenous women’s strategies for combating gendered violence and of creating constructive justice alternatives grounded in indigenous concepts of collective rights and autonomy. Beautifully written ethnography and crisp theory make this a particularly useful classroom book.’
Lynn Stephen, author of We are the Face of Oaxaca: Testimony and Social Movements

'Demanding Justice and Security constitutes a milestone in the study of indigenous women’s organizing, understanding and engaging legal pluralities in Latin America. Drawing on rich fieldwork from Bolivia, Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador and Guatemala, the authors of this collaborative research-action experience have crafted an outstanding multi-sited ethnography of gender, violence, injustice and insecurity in these countries. This remarkable volume allows for a unique opportunity to consider structural violence and its comparative effects on the gendered body politic.'
Pamela Calla, Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, New York University

Demanding Justice and Security...brings into focus communities often overlooked in much of the research on political institutions, particularly in political science. An important contribution of this work is its emphasis on intersectionality: the ways that indigenous women negotiate multiple identities of class, gender, and ethnicity and their struggles to balance gender and ethnic claims. Politics & Gender

RACHEL SIEDER is a senior research professor at the Centre for Research and Advanced Study in Social Anthropology (CIESAS) in Mexico City. She is the coeditor of Gender Justice and Legal Pluralities: Latin American and African Perspectives.

Preface
Introduction Indigenous Women and Legal Pluralities in Latin America: Demanding Justice and Security
Rachel Sieder

Part I Gender and Justice—Between State Law and International Norms
Chapter 1 Between Community Justice and International Litigation: The Case of Inés Fernández before the Inter-American Court
Rosalva Aída Hernández Castillo
Chapter 2 Domestic Violence and Access to Justice: The Political Dilemma of the Cuetzalan Indigenous Women’s Home (CAMI)
Adriana Terven Salinas
Chapter 3 Between Participation and Violence: Gender Justice and Neoliberal Government in Chichicastenango, Guatemala
Rachel Sieder

Part II Indigenous Autonomies and Struggles for Gender Justice
Chapter 4 Indigenous Autonomies and Gender Justice: Women’s Dispute for Security and Rights in Guerrero, Mexico
María Teresa Sierra
Chapter 5 Gender Inequality, Indigenous Justice, and the Intercultural State: The Case of Chimborazo, Ecuador
Emma Cervone y Cristina Cucuri
Chapter 6 Let Us Walk Together”: Chachawarmi [Male-Female] Complementarity and Indigenous Autonomies in Bolivia
Ana Cecilia Arteaga Böhrt
Chapter 7 Participate, Make Visible, Propose: The Wager of Indigenous Women in the Organizational Process of the Regional Indigenous Council of the Cauca (CRIC)
Leonor Lozano

Part III Women’s Alternatives in the Face of Racism and Dispossession
Chapter 8 Voices within Silences: Indigenous Women, Security, and Rights in the Mountain Region of Guerrero
Mariana Mora
Chapter 9 Grievances and Crevices of Resistance: Maya Women Defy Goldcorp
Morna Macleod
Chapter 10 Intersectional Violence: Triqui Women Confront Racism, the State, and Male Leadership
Natalia De Marinis

Part IV Methodological Perspectives
Chapter 11 Methodological Routes: Toward a Critical and Collaborative Legal Anthropology
Rosalva Aída Hernández Castillo and Adriana Terven

Notes on Contributors
Index

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